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Day 5 of the 100-yard diet

For breakfast, wheat berries with cream and honey. It was tasty and satisfying and fairly quick. I’d soaked them overnight – I’m doing even more thinking ahead.

Then, time to grind another pound of wheat for bread. This time I picked through the wheat to remove more bits of stem and hull. They may add fiber to the flour, but it’s already pretty high fiber. I also added a glob of honey – fast food for yeast, so the bread will rise more. The bread is higher, and delicious, but still dark.

For lunch, leftover turkey soup.

This afternoon we learned that a good friend was rolling into town, so we invited him for an quick early dinner, since I had to go out in the evening. I made potato pancakes: grate potatoes and onions, add a bit of flour and an egg, salt and pepper, and fry in butter. I like it served with cottage cheese and applesauce. Many of our apples are too wormy to use, but I found a few to make applesauce. Then I made a quick cottage cheese; adding some rennet to warmed goat milk causes it to set, and after a hour or so I cut it into chunks. and drained the curd in cheesecloth. It wasn’t an accurate cottage cheese, but it worked. We also had some homemade turkey sausage in the freezer, which we pan-fried.

Tonight constitutes my first violations: Chet brought some California Wine, and I do not turn down Chet’s choice of wine (it was lovely); and the turkey sausage used purchased sausage casing, and the fennel in the sausage was also store bought.

Since Chet loves good food, we set out a selection of heirloom tomatoes – I picked different colorful varieties, including pink (Rose de Berne), orange (Persimmon), yellow (Sun and Snow), red (Shuntuksi Velican), and purple (Purple Cherokee), and some roasted red peppers and feta.

I cut up a lot of apples today for drying, as well as the ones for applesauce. Growing your own food, especially growing organically, means some worms in the apples and bits of stem in the wheat. Food in grocery stores is so perfect, as if it was made in a factory. We tend to think that’s normal, like those models in advertisements. But it’s not always like that in real life. Real food as it comes from the earth has character and quirks and it’s not always pretty and sometimes there are bugs.

And then you have to pick out the stems from the wheat, and cut around the spots on the apples, and if there are holes in the kale leaf, as long as there’s no caterpiller still there, it’s just as good as a whole leaf. Although I have to say, growing apples and pears is the hardest, the bugs don’t seem to miss any of the fruit. Plums and grapes produce so much and we rarely have to deal with any bugs or spots on the fruit.